Since exploding onto the scene last year with debut single ‘Follow’ and playing to packed out crowds at several Dalston locales, success looks to have come relatively easily to East London four-piece Telegram.
A series of voracious performances during a recent residency at the Shacklewell Arms saw Matt Saunders’ sonorous vocals set against flanged swirls of guitar and chugging cement mixer beats – leaving behind it a trail of critical acclaim.
The band’s story is the most extreme application of music’s DIY culture. Without a record deal they’ve so far made festival appearances in Japan, the setting for their latest video Regatta, and at Spain’s Benicassim, as well bagging a spot at Field Day in Victoria Park last June.
“On the strength of ‘Follow’ our booking agent had a lot to work with and at the time we were supporting Temples and Palma Violets, so the promoters in Japan took us on,” says bassist Oli Paget-Moon.
Self-releasing ‘Follow’, the run of 500 seven inch singles was quickly snapped up and are now changing hands for inflated sums on the internet.
Currently in the process of drawn out negotiations with labels, the band has so far relished guiding their own destiny and retaining complete control of what they do.
“The thing that I like about doing it all ourselves is that we’re way more in tune with the whole process. With massive bands, they’ve never even seen a merch stand because everybody else does it for them,” says drummer Jordan Cook.
However, the band has reached a bottleneck. While industry chiefs negotiate the band’s future, their hotly anticipated debut LP lays dormant. Not that this bothers them as they keep ticking over, gigging up and down the country. One recent gig apparently saw a Midlands venue proprietor “shirtless and stage diving” while the band played to a sold out crowd.
See Telegram play live at the Lexington, 96–98 Pentonville Road, N1 9JB on 28 December @telegramband
Local author Nina Manandhar has featured East London heavily in a new book on British popular style, What We Wore.
The book is a collection of photos submitted by people from all over the UK, covering street style from 1950
to 2010.
Published by Prestel, the book includes portraits of Four Aces founder Newton Dunbar, Dalston entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid and founder of Strut boutique Hoana Poland.
Manandhar has previously featured portraits of shoppers on Ridley Road as part of her London photography book, Money On My Oyster. She herself has lived in Hackney for over seven years.
What We Wore includes a series featuring Winston Milton, born and bred in Hackney, who is a friend of the author.
She said: “Hackney has changed so much in the time since these photos were taken. There is a thriving community of creatives here, but it’s really important to me as an artist that the new communities mix with the ones that have been here for years and Winston is a really good example of someone who bridges that divide.”
Manandhar pointed out that the book also traces the lineage of club culture, which has been integral to Hackney’s history – featuring for example Natalie Coleman’s outfit for Labyrinth, established on the site of the old Four Aces club.
The author explained: “It’s great to see how different social spaces have been inhabited by different groups in Hackney’s history.
“Stories about style are an entry point to wider social history for me and the readers.”
What We Wore: A People’s History of British Style is published by Prestel Publishing. RRP: £22.50. ISBN:9783791348988
Last summer’s secret screening: Back to the Future. Photograph: Al Overdrive
Secret Cinema is to make a shock comeback this weekend with a one-off charity screening in East London, San Francisco and Rome as a protest against “the attack on freedom of expression” represented by threats against screening political comedy The Interview.
The simultaneous screenings will take place at 6.30pm GMT on Sunday 21 December, with tickets priced £25 and all proceeds going to free speech charity Article 19.
The film and East London location are for now under wraps, though organisers have asked filmgoers to wear dark suits and bring a small gift for a stranger.
With three screenings already confirmed, Secret Cinema is looking for more global partners to join in with the simultaneous screenings. This, they hope, will strengthen the resolve of filmmakers and artists against the threat of censorship, and show solidarity with artists whose freedom of expression is routinely curtailed.
Secret Cinema’s previous charity screening of Dead Poet’s Society in August 2014 raised over £24,000 for mental health charity Mind.
Haile recommended: Ethiopian cuisine. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The Beatles said it all: John, Paul, Ringo and George inadvertently gave a name to the first near-human in history. In 1974 anthropologists who located and reconstructed the female skeleton of a hominid who lived over three million years ago, rejoiced, in their encampment in Hadar in the Awash Valley, to a euphoric tape of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’; hence her name. Our Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, had her origins in Ethiopia all those years ago, while Hackney citizens were mere blobs of ectoplasm in the primeval ooze of stream and swamp.
Later the great kingdom of Ethiopia, with its unparalleled wealth, its powerful rulers, magnificent scenery and amazing natural resources, was renowned for its jewels and rare perfumes. A sophisticated cuisine evolved to match this splendour, and even now, despite the tangled politics of its recent past, a search for Ethiopian food is for us an insight into a strange and wonderful history.
Pearl of great price
This cuisine is so far beneath the radar of ‘fine dining’ that it’s hard to locate all the places in Hackney where it can be sampled, but once you know what to look for, there is much to enjoy. The foundation of an Ethiopian meal is injera, a wondrous thing that is probably the most visually unprepossessing food ever invented, a sludge-coloured, floppy, slightly clammy pancake, with a porous sponge-like texture, but enough tensile strength and pliability to act as wrap, shovel, spoon and mopper-upper.
A batter is made from the fermented dough of a flour made from teff, the seed of a grass found only in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which is cooked on a metal disk about 50cm across. This forms the base on which the components of a meal are served; the various items are plonked on this absorbent layer, which soaks up the juices, and can also be torn into receptacles for mouthfuls of the different thick stews, wat, or zigni. Injera is nutritionally a pearl of great price, with no gluten whatsoever, but an impressive range of amino acids, vitamins, calcium, minerals, protein, carbohydrates and fibre. Its enigmatic flavour, due to days of fermentation, is neither sour nor acid, but has a distinct tang, a tasty catalyst for the flavour of the spicy meat and vegetables that are eaten with it.
Spice and veg
Vegetables are not mere ‘sides’ but an important item in the diet of the main Ethiopian religions, which have many non-meat days in the year. So vegetable stews are complex and delicious, holding their own with the meaty ones. Dried pulses and lentils, often spiced as they are dried, are cooked in rich dishes, with more flavouring from one of the many different spice mixtures. Spinach or chard is often combined with lentils, cabbage gets a crisp pungency. Sometimes cheese is added, but every vegetable dish has its distinct characteristics.
The spice mixtures used in Ethiopian cuisine are not dissimilar to North Africa and the Middle East, but have their own distinct personalities, mainly from the use of certain items like fenugreek and a rare kind of cardamom, and of course chilli, but with moderation; berbere spice powder is one of the best known, or awaze, a red chilli paste. You could use harissa, or some of the Turkish tomato and chilli pastes, but the effect is not quite the same. Here is a tired woman in a hurry’s cheat:
Zigni Wat
400g good quality minced beef
2 or 3 red onions, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons of Turkish chilli
and red pepper paste
fenugreek, cardamom and
black cumin ground together
ginger, chopped
garlic, chopped
spiced butter
salt to taste
Cook the onion slowly in a heavy bottomed pan until soft and just changing colour. Add the ginger and garlic, then the spice paste and the ground spices. Put in a little water and stir well. Then put in the meat and cook gently until done.
But there are two other factors: the ‘dry’ cooking of ingredients at the start of preparation, where onions, peeled and finely chopped, are cooked slowly without water or fat, until soft and slightly coloured, and then added to the rest of the ingredients. Meat too, is given the same treatment. Unctuousness and flavour are imparted by another magical element, spiced butter, which is added as a flavouring in the course of cooking, not used as a frying medium. Clarified butter is simmered with ginger, garlic and chopped red onion, and a mixture of herbs and spices, then cooled and strained. Again, there is no substitute for this, but it doesn’t take too long
to do.
Second youth: Thurston Moore on Stoke Newington Church Street. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The summer of 1981 was long and cruel: average temperatures in New York City pushed 30°C and the air was a sticky wet. The United States had entered recession and unemployment had almost doubled since the previous winter. The new president, Ronald Reagan, wouldn’t be proclaiming “morning in America” for another three years – this was what seemed like the endless night before that morning (which, for many, still didn’t amount to much when it arrived).
Just half a decade earlier, New York City had been so close to bankruptcy that police cars had been mobilised to serve papers on the banks. It’s hard to believe that the Bowery, now lined with luxury apartments, was once a litter-strewn pocket of petty – and not so petty – crime. (The state’s annual murder rate was well over 1,500.) In some ways, it was closer to the New York of Travis Bickle or even Snake Plissken than that of Lena Dunham and Girls.
But one night that summer, outside the Stillwende club in the Tribeca neighbourhood of lower Manhattan, a pair of guitar players in their early twenties whooped into the air in what a friend later remembered as an exhibition of “spontaneous exuberance”. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo had just run out of the venue after playing one of their first shows as Sonic Youth, a performance in which Moore had, at some point, swapped his guitar for a snare drum (which he bashed) and Ranaldo had wielded a power drill attached to a microphone.
When Hüsker Dü released their album New Day Rising in 1985, the title’s grand announcement only underscored what music fans had known for years – in rock, at least, something exciting, something other, something else had arrived.
Sonic Youth was at the centre of that exciting-other-else. Consisting of Moore, Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Moore’s ex-wife Kim Gordon, the band fused the experimentation of New York’s No Wave and post-punk scenes with sugar-coated pop and rock, while adopting the unfussy, cerebral attitude of the city’s burgeoning art community. Albums such as Daydream Nation (1988) laid out the template that Pavement, Sebadoh and countless other bands would develop in their own ways, in increasingly divergent directions.
And their influence was such that it extended beyond their music – when Moore and Gordon announced their decision to separate in 2011, Salon ran a vaguely embarrassing article (by a stranger to them both) that began with the sentence: “I didn’t react well to the news that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, king and queen of the indie rock scene, were getting divorced after 27 years of marriage.” Despite never having crossed over to the mainstream in the way that, say, Nirvana or the Smashing Pumpkins did, they’d gone from being music icons to being icons, period.
When I meet Moore at Homa on Stoke Newington Church Street, he is curiously bashful and self-effacing, as if still settling into success after decades as an established artist. He is 56 years old but seems ageless: boyish, polite and engaged in his craft with a teen’s thirst for discovery. He’s also the first to puncture his own reputation as an icon of any kind. After our introductions (we chat about movies), he tells me he was initially “a little afraid” of working with his new bassist, Debbie Googe, best known as a member of My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream.
“I’d known Deb through the years, from when Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine would play together. We never really talked very much – it was mostly ‘hi, bye’,” Moore says. “I’d just seen one of [My Bloody Valentine’s] first reunion gigs in Brixton and I remember distinctly being impressed by Deb’s stage presence. She was really moving the engine of the band. I was just, like, ‘That’s really good.’ I didn’t think in my mind, ‘I want that.’”
When James Sedwards, his new guitar player and a friend of Googe’s, suggested a collaboration, Moore felt: “Maybe it’s too strong for me right now, because we’re just trying to get something together. Maybe my thing is not enough work – or on a level she’s used to, playing larger venues. I thought, ‘Are you willing to play small venues in the middle of England in front of 50 people?’” Such anxieties evaporated when Googe and Moore finally met to talk things over. “She was completely charming. And when we started playing gigs, I knew right away that it was such a great choice.”
Thurston Moore’s new band (from left): Debbie Googe, Steve Shelly, Thurston Moore and James Sedwards. Photograph: Phil Sharp
I tell Moore I’m surprised that he feels nervous – almost star-struck – in the company of musicians whom most would consider his peers. Does he feel intimidated by them? “Yes, certainly,” he says, without hesitation, and veers off into an anecdote about a talk John Lydon recently gave at Rough Trade East near Brick Lane as part of a book tour. “I just met Johnny Rotten for one second,” he enthuses, awed by his brush with British punk’s original agent provocateur. “He has an extremely low threshold for bullshit. He’s also a humanist – he’s very interested in humanity and people’s personal worlds being sacred to them. He’s kind of a demonised celebrity for the most part – but he’s gracious to people and still retains a lot of the pain that brought him to that personality . . . he had a fucked up childhood.”
Moore says his own upbringing was “benign”. The son of a university lecturer, he was raised as a Catholic in the suburbs of Bethel, Connecticut, and gravitated to New York for no reason other than to explore its music. “When I moved there, I was all of 18, 19 years old and New York was primarily a demographic that was older than I was – you know, the Ramones and Patti Smith were all in their mid- to late twenties. So I felt very young. I knew there were other young people moving to the city who were responding to what they were hearing coming from the CBGBs/Max’s kind of world and most of those people were hard-bitten, runaway artists and poets, like Lydia Lunch.”
Coming from a life of relative comfort, Moore initially felt out of place. “My interest in what was going on was really much more personal. I was a loner. I wasn’t part of that instant community of the denizens of No Wave, living in squalor,” he says. “I kept to myself so I was able to study what was going on around me. But I was fascinated by the lineage of New York, from the Warhol Sixties to the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church – certainly William Burroughs coming back to the city after living in London for so long. All these people were in the neighbourhood and I could see them physically.”
It seems a world away from Stoke Newington, where he has been living since last year – an increasingly upper-middle-class neighbourhood whose name has become a byword for young parents shopping for quinoa at Whole Foods. But he says that London reminds him of his life in the early 80s, as it’s “still a little rough”. New York has been “glazed over with money, but it doesn’t have the sheen of money here.”
I ask why he chose Stokey. “Oh, because Eva lived here – the woman I’m in love with.” He says this with a disarming certainty. Moore then tells me how this personal decision soon brought about professional serendipities. “She was living on Stoke Newington High Street in a flat she was renting that musicians have used through the years as a famous little hovel. That’s how I met James [Sedwards]. She was, like, ‘There’s this incredible guitar player who lives downstairs and he’s incredibly sweet and polite and plays guitar like I’ve never heard before.’ I met him in the common kitchen. He made me some tea and we sat down and started talking about records, records, records, records. And he was a Sonic Youth enthusiast. In fact, I’d met him in 1991 – he’d snuck backstage at Reading when we played there with Nirvana and Iggy and the Ramones. He was a 15-year-old lad and his friends and him said hello to me. I had a vague recollection of this happening, actually. So all these years later, I met this person and started playing music with him.”
But Stoke Newington had other associations, too – he used to stay here in the 80s at the crash pad of Richard Boon, the former manager of the Buzzcocks and a Rough Trade employee who now works at the local library. Since that time, the area has undergone “incredible change” – he speaks wistfully of how improv nights were once held at the old Vortex club, which occupied the site now taken by Nando’s. I say that London writes over itself quickly and he agrees, but adds: “It also reveals itself really personally to everybody who lives here.” When we finish up our drinks and start walking towards our homes, I see Moore wave at an acquaintance, get excited by a table of Matchbox cars at the Hackney Flea Market and chat with a furniture seller about a shelf. He seems very much at home.
The Best Dayby Thurston Moore is out now on Matador Records
Canine companions are ever more popular in Hackney as people seek exercise partners and guardians. Yet many novice dog owners have limited knowledge of how to care for their precious pooch, and there are doubtless far more dog-lovers who are put off the idea of getting a puppy for fear of not being able to cope.
Now Stoke Newington-based dog trainer and behaviourist Louise Glazebrook has come to the rescue with this advice-packed book on how to take care of your hound in an urban environment.
Dog about Town: How to Raise a Happy Dog in the City provides advice on everything from selecting the right breed to providing your animal with appropriate mental stimulation. We also learn about canine nutrition, housing and clothing; and there are useful tips on dog training, walking and holiday care.
The advice can be sobering: dogs need to be walked at least two hours a day and should not be left at home for more than four hours on their own. But there are also fascinating titbits, such as how to interpret different types of tail wag, and the number of scent-detecting cells a dog has in its nose (up to 225 million, whereas humans only have 5 million).
Whether it is read cover-to-cover as a crash course in dog ownership or kept on the shelf as a useful reference guide, Dog about Town is full of practical advice and reassurance for those keen to do right by their canine.
The clear, easy-to digest information and stylish illustrations make this chunky little volume a perfect stocking-stuffer.
Dog about Town: How to Raise a Happy Dog in the City is published by Hardie Grant Books. ISBN: 9781742707754. RRP: £12.99.
Back in the day: the site that became Hackney City Farm. Photograph: David Walters
At the start, building up a roster of animals was a patchwork affair.
“In the beginning, the horse came with Carol, who was a local person. There were some rabbits, which actually came from Bridgewater in Somerset because a lady wanted to help us. Some were bought, some of the chickens were incubated through school projects. Turkeys were brought in and… er, prepared for Christmas, with the community plucking them.”
Such a gathering of livestock – described by David Walters, who oversaw it in the early 1980s – is part of the huge number of things you need to do if you want to transform an abandoned brewery on Hackney Road into a working farm.
Hackney City Farm, as it exists today, is a picture of what you’ll end up with: two and a half acres complete with pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, donkeys, rabbits, guinea-pigs, occasional sheep, fruit trees and bushes; a school where 10 pupils who have been excluded from other schools in the borough receive a full-time education; and a café which many people originally thought was very expensive but which today is probably one of the cheapest on the road.
Taking Stock
It’s now 30 years since Hackney City Farm got underway, and it is celebrating with an Arts Council-funded project called Stepping Out, a series of interactive displays and installations featuring many of Walters’ photographs from the early days: horses and carts, school children planting crops, and workmen zooming across slow-exposure film looking like constructive ghosts.
It took six years for the idea of Hackney City Farm to become a reality. In 1978 Walters had just finished a course in youth and community work, and was making a
living as a milkman, looking around for something else to do. He wanted to be part of a project that would go beyond the limits of his classes: “When I’d been doing my course I realised at the end I was interested in doing a community project with all family ages, not just youth work.”
He soon found the group which was eventually named the Hackney City Farm Movement, a collection of teachers, social workers and local people who had their eyes on a couple of old garages off Mount Pleasant Road, with a view to creating a community garden, home to flora and fauna.
“They were interested in getting something which was a family-orientated project,” says Walters. “They liked the idea of animals because they brought people closer to each other. One of the philosophical arguments was that if you cared for animals and you cared for plants, then you actually cared more for other people. And it made the way you interacted with people more positive.”
Geography was different in the late 1970s. Walters relates how at meetings half a mile from where he lived people would say to him: “You don’t live round here”.
“The borough then was still a lot of little villages,” says Walters. “You could cross all sorts of interesting boundary lines, and you were either part of something or you weren’t.”
Walters didn’t think the garages were up to much and, overcoming his outsider status, managed to persuade the group to set up a steering committee to find a proper site. In the end, they looked at more than 200 possible locations, and were offered the Middlesex Filter Beds on Hackney Marshes. But the group liked the filter beds as they were and didn’t want to turn them into a farm.
“You don’t just take something because it’s available,” Walters contends. “You take it because you can build on its intrinsic shape. Sometimes things that are left unmanaged end up being quite beautiful forests. It might be better not having anything there, having it as an open space.”
Hackney Council was on board from early on. Councillors were “quite keen to have a different type of community facility which would engage with people”, recalls Walters. “There were the various animal sites, in Clissold for example, but they were quite passive – you were viewing. Volunteers weren’t involved with them and
people were kept at a distance.”
The city farm they had in mind would, from the start, be centred around active participation. “One of the things we learnt was that you’ve got to work with people and they’ve got to manage things as well.”
Bucolic: a donkey takes a nap. Photograph: Hackney City Farm
End in site
Finally the group found the Hackney Road site, which the farm has occupied ever since. Planning permission hinged on proving animals and manure wouldn’t poison the children’s hospital next door. Trips to the farm and interactions with the animals would in fact eventually become a key part of care offered at the hospital.
Walters loves this kind of wider interaction with the surrounding community, which the farm has developed. “What the farm is fundamentally is a community resource for the local area,” he says. “The fact it has animals in it is only part of its attraction. We were there to provide facilities where possible for people who had none.” This extended to simply letting local people use the farm’s photocopier.
Walters has developed a poetic philosophy of community projects. “If you have something that is valuable it gets shown in different ways,” he explains. “You get attracted in the dark to someone striking a match; you look at the light. The farm does that in many ways. It draws people in and then it draws out of them other things. So they might come in for a walk, they might come in to the café. They might come in for a pottery class. They might come in because they’re attracted by the atmosphere. It happens to have animals and plants, which is important because a lot of that is missing.”
Such projects need to be open to change. If a resource is “rigid”, Walters says, then it “loses its locality”. The farm “needs to be open-minded about the possibilities of what might happen. Every farm has got a different constituency, a different set of activities and it’s all to do with the energies of the people involved.”
Originally granted a 90-year lease, the farm is secure for some time to come. Asked what changes he sees for the farm in the future, Walters returns to the site’s original infrastructure as a brewery, including its 90-ft well. “You could end up getting Hackney spa water out of that,” he proposes.
The farm also has plans to try and acquire around five acres of land outside London, to act as somewhere for Hackney people to escape to. Anyone with such an asset is invited to get in touch.
For the Stepping Out project, the Farm is also trying to trace other founding members.
If you were involved in Hackney City Farm at any point of its development, or know someone who was, please email charlie@hackneycityfarm.co.uk or drop into the farm at 1A Goldsmiths Row, E2 8JQ
Iain Sinclair at the launch of 70×70. Photograph: Laura Bradley
Something about Iain Sinclair’s latest book screams of a serious author having some serious fun. 70×70 – Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked In 70 Films is a deliciously poetic documentation of a sprawling curation project that does exactly what it says on the tin, and then some.
In celebration of his 70th birthday – and in response to a suggestion made by King Mob’s Paul Smith – the Hackney wordsmith rummaged through his own back catalogue in search of traces of works he’s hunted, happened upon, made and admired. From it, he pulled a film for every year to date, weaving together a rich sort of cultural autobiography.
Over the next 12 months, Sinclair screened all 70 films in a series of special events across the city, trekking out to obscure parts of town to talk about everything from Douglas Sirk’s wonderful Tarnished Angels to Patricio Guzmán’s jaw-dropping Nostalgia for the Light.
With the mammoth undertaking done and dusted, Unlicensed Preaching represents something of a project journal.
The book is split into two main parts: the first a collection of short passages offering nutritious insight into each of the films concerned, and the second a record of the events held, comprising Sinclair’s intros, transcripts of conversations, and contributions from friends and collaborators, such as Alan Moore, Chris Petit and Andrew Kötting.
The essays in the first section are sure to delight anyone with a modicum of interest in film. Whether or not you’ve seen the material is of minor significance. Reading about Kiefer Sutherland making “a pass at that cryogenic Burroughs voice of world-weary cynicism” opposite Courtney Love’s “emboldened” Joan Vollmer in Beat – and what it is about this bizarre feature that works – is fascinating, regardless of prior knowledge.
Reading about directors you are more likely to have preconceptions of – like Godard, Sirk, Welles and Hitchcock – is an education, but perhaps most interesting are the commentaries on Sinclair’s own work and that of his friends. An extended piece on his collaboration with Petit and Susan Stenger on Marine Court Rendezvous – “where the silenced dead catch up with their fugitive souls” – is simply marvellous. And the same goes for his thoughts on Kötting’s stunning This Our Still Life.
The second section expands on the reasoning behind his choices and furthers the intrigue. We learn about things like the “collaging and bricolage of sounds”, the spillage as “projects leak into each other”, and much more. He loosely situates each film within both a personal and wider cultural landscape, with key figures and ideas popping up over and again.
This unclassifiable book knits a complex tapestry of history, memory, documentary and fiction in a way that those familiar with Sinclair’s writing will surely recognise. His sentences are often dense and always thrilling to roll your tongue around. But his ideas on the past, present and future of cinema are what remain, steadfast and long after reading.
70×70: Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked in 70 Films is published by Volcano Publishing. ISBN: 9780992643454. RRP: £25
Four Corners Film: image from Fathom by Gayle Chong Kwan.
Small arts organisations will be ‘penalised’ if Arts Council funding is reallocated away from London, according to an East London arts charity.
Last month a Department for Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report called on the Arts Council to urgently redress the balance of funding away from the capital.
But Carla Mitchell, Development Director of Four Corners Film in Bethnal Green, described the report’s findings as “a broad brush measure that fails to recognise distinctions within London”.
Mitchell added: “The supposed disproportionate amount of funding granted to London is because the overwhelming proportion of funding goes to nationally significant arts organisations.
“This argument fails to recognise the smaller arts organisations that make up a vital network of London’s arts infrastructure, which will be penalised if [reallocation of funding] goes ahead.
“There’s a real risk in places like Hackney where arts organisations do hugely valuable work at a much more grassroots infrastructure level.”
Five organisations received 51 per cent of the Arts Council’s investment in National Portfolio and Major Partner Museums for London in 2014–15: the Royal Opera House, the Southbank Centre, the National Theatre, the English National Opera and the English National Ballet.
The Arts Council’s response to the DCMS report included the pledge “to build capacity outside of London whilst not damaging the infrastructure in the capital”.
Having notched up some serious critical acclaim with his first venture, The Phone Call, local screenwriter James Lucas has turned to the streets of Hackney for his latest work in progress. Thus far, the script for the intriguingly titled Bohemian Motorcycle Club is just about finished and makes for a riveting read.
“Its about a disillusioned young advertising exec called Ed,” explains Lucas. “He gets drawn into an exciting world of choppers, liquor and women via a fledgling motorcycle club, The Bohemians. He sees an opportunity, applies some of his skillset to the club and helps them to make money.
“Unfortunately, hard partying, a forbidden love affair and the entrance of an outlaw biker gang precipitate a descent into criminality and violence.”
A passionate motorcycle enthusiast himself, Lucas took inspiration from two of his friends who founded the refreshingly inclusive East London-based biker brand Black Skulls.
“I love motorbikes so I was immediately drawn in by the rumble of engines and the line up of bikes outside their garage. My imagination began racing and I thought a biker gang based in Hackney was a very original basis for a film.”
The script suggests something of a Spaghetti Western set in amongst the trendy, creative terrain of the modern-day East End – still rough and endearingly ragged round the edges. It presents a clutch of brand new Hackney characters that haven’t previously seen the light of day on screen, and is laced with local insight and profound authenticity.
Perhaps also demonstrating a sense of tiredness with the tedium of the day-to-day corporate world, it seems in part to be about taking a risk, branching out and trying something brave and a little bit wild.
“I look at the burgeoning custom bike scene here in Hackney and across the globe and I see it as an interesting way to view London – almost like looking at it through an oil-smudged pair of eyes. It’s this fresh approach I’m excited about and I’d like to produce a film that’s all at once stylish, unflinching, slightly feral and entertaining.”
On first impressions, it would appear to mark quite a departure from the stark and glorious simplicity of The Phone Call – an engrossing short that focuses entirely on a single phone conversation between Sally Hawkins and a troubled Jim Broadbent. But for Lucas there are definite similarities.
“The Phone Call is a very soulful tale and if you peel back the Screaming Eagle mufflers and tattoos in Bohemian Motorcycle Club, underneath you’ll find it’s similarly a story about human connection and drama. Empathy seems to be a common thread in my writing.”
With his first short standing a good chance of an Oscar nomination early next year and plans to start making Bohemian Motorcycle Club in 2015, it’s an exciting time for this talented Hackney writer. He’s also working on a psychosexual thriller TV series, The Chameleon, and he’s some way into a Paul Gascoigne biopic that’s now in official development. With his plate stacked high and heavy, how’s he coping with the pressure?
“I think the success of The Phone Call has galvanised me to continue writing and producing compelling film. In terms of pressure, come back to me when Bohemian Motorcycle Club goes into pre-production. I’ll probably be on serious meds by then.”
